Papers by Brian Krostenko
Oxford University Press eBooks, Jan 17, 2024
... in Cicero's Speeches 154 VI Introduction 154 V.2. Lo... more ... in Cicero's Speeches 154 VI Introduction 154 V.2. Looking Down from the Inside: The Roman Gaze 156 V.3. Looking Down from Above ... My mother-in-law, Jean Bennett Downs of San Francisco, gen-erously provided a subvention that permitted me to have translated from the ...
Journal of Roman Studies, 2003
Charm, wit and style were critical, but dangerous, ingredients in the social repertoire of the Ro... more Charm, wit and style were critical, but dangerous, ingredients in the social repertoire of the Roman elite. Their use drew special attention, but also exposed one to potential ridicule or rejection for valuing style over substance. Brian A. Krostenko explores the complexities and ambiguities of charm, wit and style in Roman literature of the late Republic by tracking the origins, development and use of the terms that described them, which he calls "the language of social performance". As Krostenko desmonstrates, a key feature of this language is its capacity to express both approval and disdain - an artifact of its origins at a time when the "style" and "charm" of imported Greek cultural practices were greeted with both enthusiasm and hostility. Cicero played on that ambiguity, for example, by chastising "lepidus" ("fine") boys in the "Second Oration against Catiline" as degenerates, then arguing in his "De Oratore" that the successful speaker must have a certain charming "lepos" ("wit"). Catullus, in turn, exploited and inverted the political subtexts of this language for innovative poetic and erotic idioms.
Palamedes
This article argues that some formal features of Cicero’s speech pro rege Deiotaro reflect Cicero... more This article argues that some formal features of Cicero’s speech pro rege Deiotaro reflect Cicero’s understanding of the ideological strains of those days. Some of the charges brought against Deiotarus seem likely to be true. Cicero’s rebuttals of those charges seem weak by the normal conventions of courtroom argument. But the rebuttals draw on modes of speech appropriate for sophisticated dinner parties—literary criticism, poetry, and moral philosophy. The arguments are not necessarily more successful for that, but they do make an ideological point: if political decisions now depend on one man, that brings political decisions very close to questions of taste and sensibility, which in their turn become a valuable and even necessary source of arguments. This aspect of Cicero’s rhetorical approach in the speech exploits the setting, Caesar’s house: Cicero speaks as if he were in a place where, not forensic convention, but intellectual intimacy was the chief value. But Cicero’s artful ...
Polis: The Journal for Ancient Greek and Roman Political Thought, 2021
Cicero’s first speeches as consul, de lege agraria I and II, delivered to the senate and the peop... more Cicero’s first speeches as consul, de lege agraria I and II, delivered to the senate and the people respectively, are virtually identical in outline and broad argument. That allows the rhetorical technique of individual sections to be compared closely. This article uses such comparisons to probe the tactics and ideology of the speeches. In both Cicero’s choice of word and phrase might suggest that he is simply addressing his audiences as suits their stations. But a consideration of the circumstances of the speeches reveals instead that Cicero is directing his audiences to alternate ways of imagining their social and political positions; in effect, Cicero propounds distinct, principled, and communalist definitions of dignitas and libertas, core values of each audience – though sometimes at the price of distorting the intent of the bill.
Journal of Roman Studies, 2016
Transactions of the American Philological Association, 2000
Journal of Roman Studies, 2013
A Companion to Catullus
... Catullus also comments pointedly on the habits of appraisal of elite culture and thus of poli... more ... Catullus also comments pointedly on the habits of appraisal of elite culture and thus of political life, in which appraisal figured and in which struggles over evaluative language were regular.1 Those habits are revealed in stark clarity by a poet who, if he was in foro otiosus, was ...
Journal of Roman Studies, 2013
An analysis of the formal features of the ‘epitaph’ of the poet Naevius reveals the handiwork of ... more An analysis of the formal features of the ‘epitaph’ of the poet Naevius reveals the handiwork of a later author who admired the older style of poetry represented by Naevius and used the allusive features of that style to reflect on the changing character of Latin poetics and its relationship to Hellenism. The very poetics of the epigram reveal a thoughtful attempt to admit Hellenic affect without sacrificing Roman sensibilities. Especially important is the relationship between divine and mortal and the proper hierarchy of the social world. The epigram is, in short, one literary reflection of the cultural and social struggles of the mid-second century b.c.
Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 2004
Classical Antiquity, 2001
This article describes how cc. 39 and 37 create distinct tones of voice and use them to preclude ... more This article describes how cc. 39 and 37 create distinct tones of voice and use them to preclude the social pretensions of Egnatius in different spheres. The style of c. 39, markedly oratorical—and non-Catullan—in the syntax of its opening lines, develops into the voice of a respectable senex by way of archaisms of vocabulary and syntax and is capped by a figure of humor otherwise absent from the polymetrics, the apologus. The style thus creates a voice perfectly suited to chastise Egnatius' social ineptitudes and, more importantly, constitutes on the verbal level an embodiment of the standards of the urban elite. Catullus thus illustrates to Egnatius that a subtle system of social gestures can be learned - something which Egnatius, for all his apparent pretensions to social prominence, manifestly has not grasped, marred as he is by the habit of grinning inappropriately. C. 37, which ends with an attack on the same Egnatius, is far different in tone, commingling tokens of artful...
Glotta, 2000
... OHG spiz (= NHD Spiefi), a protoform evidently chosen with a view to the element of 'poi... more ... OHG spiz (= NHD Spiefi), a protoform evidently chosen with a view to the element of 'pointiness' in such applications as 'gable'. 19 ueteres pennas dicebant, non ptnnas (ad Aen. 2.479). 20 Schwind 170-72. ... Ose. kerssnats 'cênïs'. On pesnas - pennas, see Hamp 1973: 151-52). ...
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Papers by Brian Krostenko